Summary of the August 2003 commissioning run

Summary:

This run was almost fully weathered out, and very little has been done at night. We had the equivalent of 3 nights of open dome, all of which was with either very bad seeing (full distribution from 0.5 to 4", with very little time under 1.5) and/or thick cirrus. We had some opportunities to test the dither sequences with GMOS, which now work successfully for sequences without the use of the GMOS OIWFS.

We were able to get a couple of estimate of the image quality after correction on GMOS over the 2 arcmin diameter field of view. Typical performance corresponds to a factor of 1.5 to 2 improvement over the central area of the field, with slight degradation with respect to natural seeing at the edge.

Future commissioning work of GMOS with Altair will be scheduled following prioritization of science capabilities.

The latest Altair software was also tested and proved to be robust. Some work remain to be done on the stability of the Real Time Displays. Much of the open dome work was geared toward seqexec work. Dither sequences now work flawlessly (when not using the GMOS OIWFS, which is the recommended case when looking at anything but the faintest sources). Statistics files are now saved automatically for each exposures, triggered by the seqexec.